The last day of Tech Ed is always kind of sad. A lot of folks fly out early on Friday.

Greg and I got a RunAs interview with Kim Tripp and Paul Randal, two dear friends of mine. It was very hard to get serious enough to actually get through the interview, it was another big laugh fest.

With Speaker Idol over, our schedule wasn't quite as tight, but at noon we were still back at the Community Lounge one last time for two events - the last passport draw and a reprise of the 64 Bit Question.

Since it was the last day of the show, we offered to give away as much swag as people had left over... and they delivered. When we arrived at the Community Lounge the place was buried in swag. Greg and I spent a good half hour just doing inventory.

In the end we were able to collate a dozen bundles of prizes for the 64 Bit Question. Every contestant got a copy of Vista Ultimate, Office 2007 Professional and an MS Press Book. One contestant won an HTC Touch! Beyond that, there was dozen of t-shirts, extra conference bags, Microsoft mice, pens, notebooks... it was literally a large table covered in stuff.

When the 64 Bit Question was over, we ran over to the table and started throwing things to the audience. They helped themselves as well. In minutes, everything was gone.

And the conference, more or less, was over. At least for us. We started making our goodbyes.

Its astounding how many people it takes to run a conference of this size. Saying goodbye and thanking the folks we worked directly with took a couple of hours.

We got back to the hotel relatively early, but we weren't done yet - Greg and I had invitations to the Speakers Party!

We started out the day doing RunAs interviews - we've been so busy doing other sorts of interviews that we hadn't taken care of our own stuff well enough. The good news is that there's lots of amazing people at IT Forum and getting a great interview is pretty easy.

The big event today was a double dose of Speaker Idol - Wave Four *and* the Finals.

Wave Four was a really strong group of competitors, Jakob Heidelburg won in a very tight competition.

We had a chance to grab a quick bit before racing back to the Community Lounge for the Speaker Idol finals. Then our mystery judge was revealed - none other than Mark Russinovich!

Before the competition could start, we had a special announcement. Mark Budzinski, the winner of Wave Three took the stage and very graciously explained that as much as he enjoyed Speaker Idol, he did not plan to be a speaker at Tech Ed in the future (which is the goal of Speaker Idol after all), and so declined his slot in the finals. The audience gave him a fine round of applause.

That left us in a bit of a spot - we were missing a competitor! Ilse Van Criekinge was the runner up of Wave Three, so she filled in. And don't worry, we knew about Mark's situation the night before and we gave Ilse some warning... just wanted to wait until the finals to make the announcement.

So now we had our finals line up: Peter Mendelsohn from Germany, Maral Topalian from Lebanon, Ilse Van Criekinge from Belgium and Jakob Heidelberg from Denmark.

All four competitors were very talented, I think every one of them would make an excellent Tech Ed speaker.

It took awhile for the judges to tally up their scoring, then the results came in. The winner: Ilse Van Criekinge! Ilse won a speaker's slot at Tech Ed IT Forum in 2008. The runner up was Maral Topalian. Maral wins a delegate ticket to Tech Ed IT Forum in 2008 (although everyone suggested she submit sessions too).

I was blown away to realize that the first two women competitors in Speaker Idol came in first and second. As the competition came to a close, there were lots of interviews for the contestants.

When Greg and I finally got clear of the hub-bub around Speaker Idol, we grabbed Steve Riley, snuck off to a quiet corner and grabbed a fun interview. Steve is such an entertaining guy, I think most of the edits for the show will be lifting out the excessive laughter.

Then it was back to the Community Lounge for another passport draw. Then back to the FishBowl for more interviews.

It turned into another late night... Greg and I had dinner at the hotel and crashed early. One more day to go.

Today was the busiest day so far doing interviews. In the FishBowl they're really only equipped for one-on-one interviews, so Greg and I have been sharing duties when they come up, largely based on topic.

Around noon we split to the Community Lounge for Speaker Idol. The wave had the other woman competitor, by the name of Isle Van Criekinge. However, she didn't win the wave, the winner for this wave was Mark Budzinski.

After Speaker Idol we grabbed some lunch, squeezed a couple of RunAs Radio interviews in and then went back to the Community Lounge for the Passport Draw.

The Passport Draw is based on passports handed out in the vendor space that the attendees take with them from booth-to-booth, getting stamps in it. When the passport is full, its placed in a draw box at the help desk.

On Wednesday, Thursday and Friday Greg and I draw from the box for a winner of a nice Casio camera.

Today was the first draw, we drew a huge crowd (its really a nice camera), did the drawing and tossed out a bunch of t-shirts as well.

Once the drawing was done, we were actually done for the day, and at a reasonable hour! We finally had a chance to get out of the conference center and head to Las Ramblas to have some fun.

Zaak and Susan joined us for dinner at a great restaurant called The Four Cats. Apparently Picasso used to hang out there! The food was lovely (I had an Iberian pork dish). We rode the subway there and back, the system in Barcelona works great and the TechEd folks gave us free subway passes.

Greg and I talked to Jeremy Moskowitz about Group Policy in Active Directory. Jeremy has the definitive books on the topic, and, as he points out, if you have Active Directory set up, you're already using Group Policy, just not very intentionally.

Let us know what you think at info@runasradio.com.

Now that the body of the conference is underway, Greg and I settle into a routine. We hang out at the Virtual TechEd FishBowl and do interviews all day. For the IT Forum Virtual Side the interviews tend to be short - only five minutes or so. For Virtual TechEd the interviews are longer, 15-25 minutes or so. And then there's RunAs Radio - sometimes we do the interview in the FishBowl, but since its audio-only, that's not required, so we'll sneak off to some quiet corner, often the speakers lounge, to do the interview there.

We certainly don't do all the interviews, Tony Krijnen and Daniel van Soest from the Virtual Side have been handling most of them, and in some cases the interviewee comes with an interviewer. But when Tony and Daniel are booked and there's an interview to be done, Greg or I will step in. Its good fun.

Around lunch time we head for the Community Lounge in the vendor's hall to host the second wave of Speaker Idol. And for the first time ever (as far as I know, anyway), we had a women competitor in Speaker Idol - Maral Topalian from Lebanon. To top if off, Maral won wave two!

In the evening Greg and I went to the Women in Technology dinner. No, we're not women, but we weren't the only men there either. It wasn't a large group, only around 30 or so, but it was a fascinating discussion from my point of view. As a father of two daughters who are technically savvy (they really have no choice in the matter), hearing the challenges of women working in technology surprised me.

We started out today at a sprint - bringing Greg into the conference center and getting him badged up, then straight to the trade show floor where the Community Lounge is, which includes the Speaker Idol stage.

First on the agenda: The Speaker Idol briefing. Most of the contestants were there, including two women (first time ever, as far as I know). There's a total of seventeen contestants over four waves. The first three waves will have four contestants each, the fourth wave will have five contestants.

Each contestant in the wave does a five minute presentation in front of a panel of judges and an audience. Greg and I are the hosts, we introduce the judges, the contestants and generally move things along. Our job is pretty easy until something goes wrong and we have to keep things moving anyway.

The waves run Monday to Thursday. Monday the wave is in the evening, the rest of the week the waves are at lunch time. In the afternoon on Thursday there's the finals, in which the winner of each wave presents a second time.

The judging panel is made up of Andy Malone (last years winner), John Craddock (presenter extraordinaire), Michael Anderburg (the security track chair) and none-other than Steve Riley, the over-the-top, anything-goes-just-get-your-message-across world class speaker. Rumor has it we'll have a mystery judge for the finals.

The first Speaker Idol was last year at the developer week of Tech Ed Europe - Carl and I served as hosts. We then brought Speaker Idol to Tech Ed US, which went extremely well. Coming back to Europe I could see we'd learned a few things about putting on the event, it was that much smoother than last year.

After the briefing, I reviewed the swag for 64 Bit Question - we would be doing the game show immediately following Speaker Idol. We've done the 64 Bit Question a number of different ways, depending on the environment. This was the first time we'd be doing an all IT audience 64 Bit Question, which just meant a different set of questions. When we do the game show in a session room (with everyone seated), we can do a more elaborate format... but for the Community Lounge (with everyone standing), we go with the simple format: one contestant, one question, one prize.

With a few hours to spare between the meetings and the first wave of Speaker Idol, I headed for the speakers lounge and discovered that two floors below was the Virtual TechEd Fishbowl! And there, sitting in the front, my dear friend Zaakera Stratman, the boss. I first met Zaak at Tech Ed US when Virtual TechEd first took off and we coined the name "FishBowl" for the plexiglass room that all recording and editing is done in.

At Tech Ed Europe, the FishBowl was stashed away in a lower part of the conference center, which is unfortunate because very few people got to see it in action. The whole point of the FishBowl is to be visible within the conference. But, space constraints being what they are, you work with what you've got. Zaak was struggling with getting enough interviewers for all her interviews, so Greg and I pitched in immediately.

A few interviews later we had to run back to the Community Lounge for the first wave of Speaker Idol. The trade show floor had just opened and the crowd was massive - hundreds of folks were in the Community Lounge. The first wave is always a challenge as we knock the bugs out of the process, but for the most part things went smoothly, and in about an hour we had our first wave winner: Peter Mendelsohn.

Then it was time for the 64 Bit Question, which flew by - we did a dozen questions, grabbing folks from the audience to answer them. Some knew the answers right away, some had a bit more challenge, but in the end, all the prizes were given out.

With that, we were done, and it was late... Greg and I hadn't had a chance to eat or anything. Fortunately, nobody in Barcelona eats early, so we grabbed dinner around 10pm at one of the restaurants on the way back to the hotel.

Tomorrow would be an easier day of interviews for Virtual TechEd, for IT Forum Virtual Side and for RunAs Radio... and one more wave of Speaker Idol.

Just arrived in Barcelona for Tech Ed IT Forum after 15 hours of travel... which is good speed, all things considered. Greg arrived the day before me.

This whole week is totally focused on RunAs Radio related tasks, since its all IT. We're hosting Speaker Idol and the 64 Bit Question, plus grabbing as many shows as we possibly can. No sessions, no panels, no trade show, no developer stuff at all.

I was in Barcelona last year, so things seemed relatively familiar. What I didn't remember is that there's only one ATM machine in the airport and most ATM cards don't work in it anyway. And I forgot to grab my excess euros before leaving the house, so I had no local currency.

Then I spotted the IT Forum girls, directing folks like me toward the buses. A free ride to the conference center - great solution.

Arrived at the conference center to discover I don't exist anywhere in the system, but enough fussing and contacting the right people gets me a crew badge. Then I walked to the hotel - not the Hilton right beside the conference center, but the Vincci Condal Mar, a half mile away or so.

So I may be jetlagged, but I'm fully booked in and ready to get to work tomorrow.

Started this morning early, packing up and checking out - Kent and I would fly out together this afternoon. I need to get back tonight because I leave on Saturday for Barcelona and Tech Ed Europe IT Forum.

First thing this morning was my second session with Kent, called Load Testing ASP.NET Applications for Performance and Scaling. Had some technical problems with the network, but I solved them on the fly while Kent did a soft-shoe number.

I use my big tank of a laptop, the Dell M90, to do this demo. I'm running two virtual machines at once: one has the load test environment on it, the other is the web server, databases, etc.

We dig into all the goodies around load testing - using perfmon, using WAST (old, but free) and Visual Studio for Testers (new, not free).

The 75 minutes tears by... there's so much to talk about in this space. But we get to run a few real tests along the way and talk about what their results mean.

As soon as the session was done I was running across the conference center again, this time to a RunAs Radio Live session with Chris Avis. Since RunAs Radio is only a half hour show, we actually recorded two separate topics, one on deployment, the other on spam management in Exchange.

When we were done there, I had a few minutes to rest before running off with Carl to do the DotNetNuke Futures Panel. All the senior folks from DotNetNukeCorp were on the panel talking about taking DotNetNuke to the next level. The reality is that DotNetNuke has gotten successful enough that it needs full time people just to manage the volunteers, much less dig into the less-cool stuff that needs to be built to make DotNetNuke fully viable in the enterprise space.

Carl and I sat at either end of the table, managed questions from the audience and generally kept things moving along. I'm sure it'll be a great .NET Rocks show when its published.

The moment the panel was done, I shook hands with everyone and ran - back to the speakers lounge to pick up Kent and head for the airport.

We had a little excitement at the airport with Kent's ticket (we flew Philippine Airlines home, it was the only thing that fit the schedule), but otherwise, the day went well.

And now I'm home. For like, 48 hours. Then its off to Barcelona!

Greg and I talked to Randy Smith about locking down Vista. We couldn't help laughing a bit about UAC, but that's to be expected. We did get into more of the cool things that Vista adds, like controlling USB keys, using BitLocker, and so on.

Send your feedback to info@runasradio.com.

Greg and I talked to Brien Posey about securing Exchange Server. We ranged all over the map - there's so much to talk about in this space, depending on your Exchange configuration. The sheer variety of connection methods for Exchange, from VPNs to RPC over HTTP, using SSL, OWA and Outlook Mobile Access... how many holes in the firewall can one product poke?

Happy Halloween! Send us an email at info@runasradio.com with your comments and suggestions.

Greg and I talked to Doug Toombs about some of the tools an IT Pro ought to know about.

Tried on another new format for this show - spending just a couple of minutes on each tool before moving on to the next.

It was lots of fun for us, I hope it worked for you. Let us know at info@runasradio.com.

Greg and I talked to Tony Howlett and Glenn Kramer about Information Security. We get beyond protecting credit card numbers, talking about the depth of protecting an enterprise's information from the public and its own employees as well from intentional and unintentional breaches.

Tony and Glenn work together, and you can tell they've done this duet before - always fun to chat with another duo.

Let us know how this show works for you at info@runasradio.com.

Our discussion with Joel Oleson on Sharepoint Management was largely a fallout of Sleepless in New York. Hanging out with Sharepoint guys invariably means talking Sharepoint. We tend to focus on the development of Sharepoint rather than the management of it, talking to Joel we got the IT viewpoint.

As always, email us at info@runasradio.com with your comments and questions.

Greg and I talked to Mitch Garvis about Microsoft BDD. We really dug into all the different options for automating the deployment of software in the enterprise, including SMS and the like. We also talk about the difference between no-touch and light-touch deployment. It's interesting to think about how the culture of a business affects what tools are appropriate for managing the workstations.

Let us know how we're doing with RunAs at info@runasradio.com.

We've spent some time walking around SQL Server and its business intelligence services. For this show, Greg and I talked to Trey Johnson about the overall infrastructure that Microsoft provides for Business Intelligence. Not just SQL Server's features, but also Sharepoint and ProClarity, which was recently acquired by Microsoft.

As always, we love your comments, questions and suggestions at info@runasradio.com.

Greg and I discussed a lot of potential topics around SQL Server with Brad, but eventually settled on this one because it was so unique. What does it take to be a better DBA? I agree with Brad for the most part, the challenge of being a great DBA is that you have to do it yourself, there's rarely, if ever, any infrastructure in a company around the development of the DBA career.

This show represents another distinctive style of show we're trying on for RunAs Radio... focused on career development. Like it? Let us know at info@runasradio.com.

Okay, I'll admit it - I love iSCSI. I was totally stoked when Greg and I got a chance to talk to Tom Clark about iSCSI. What iSCSI does more than anything else is bring the price of SAN infrastructure down into the realm of the medium-sized business.

iSCSI drops neatly between regular SCSI and Fiber Channel, offering a less expensive solution that is fast and flexible.

This topic work for you? Drop us a line at info@runasradio.com and let us know!

Greg and I spent a good long time with Charles Betz getting our head around where ITIL is going. The Information Technology Infrastructure Library is a set of docs focused around the infrastructure, development and management of IT systems.

Version 3 has been developed and is being adopted.

Its fun for me to put together a show that's more about methodology than product, if that works for you (or doesn't), let us know at info@runasradio.com.

Greg and I had a great time talking to David Lowe about the Windows Server 2008 Core installation. David works for Microsoft on the Windows Server Team which is totally focused on getting Windows Server 2008 out the door.

What's really cool about the core installation is that it reminds me of the old version of NT3, where we didn't need a GUI or any of that stuff, it was a server product. In some ways, the core is just like that - stripped down to the fundamentals of what servers really need to be. It'll be interesting to see what people do with it in the future.

As always, questions and comments about the show are welcome at info@runasradio.com.

Donald Farmer talks to us about data mining on the IT side of the world, away from the traditional concepts of "people who liked this book also liked..." and into the idea that we could be data mining application and event logs to help us anticipate the needs of our information systems.

Data mining is a specific set of features of Analysis Services in SQL Server 2005 - and its included in the box! If you own a license of SQL Server 2005, you own Analysis Services and its data mining capabilities.

Like this type of show? Let us know at info@runasradio.com.

After having a couple of laughs around whether we were talking about Virtualization for Disaster Recovery or Disaster Recovery for Virtualization (it was the latter), Greg and I went deep with Bob Roudebush into the issues of doing backups of guest VMs and host environments using Microsoft Virtual Server and VMWare.

We keep coming back to virtualization as a key topic for today's IT personnel. Let us know if this is what you'd like to hear at info@runasradio.com.

Our longest-distance interview yet, we talked to Sarbjit Singh Gill all the way in Singapore about his work with Sharepoint 2007. Sarbjit did a great job of helping us understand the role that Sharepoint plays in the enterprise, from a project management point for Office documents into full-blown portals for the business.

More Sharepoint shows? Send us an email at info@runasradio.com.

We got a chance to really dig into where server virtualization is at with Stephen Rose. Stephen digs into both Microsoft's Virtual Server product and VMWare's goodies. We also dive into migration strategies.

There's still plenty more to talk about in the server virtualization arena, send us an email at info@runasradio.com and give us your suggestions!

You can thank Greg Hughes for this one - after our original show we got a ton of questions about backing up to disk. Steve Witner from Quantum came to our rescue with a great discussion about using disk-based backup alone and in conjunction with tape backup. We also dug into issues around data de-duplication to be more space-efficient.

This was our most asked for show, I hope you liked it. Send us an email at info@runasradio.com and let us know!

When we recorded show #3 with Dana Epp on Cardspace, we knew we had to bring him back for more. So now, three months later, Dana returns and we talk all server side. The server side story of CardSpace isn't as simple as the client side, but its important, and its only going to get better.

A couple of weeks ago I was in Calgary to do my SQL Querying presentation for the Calgary .NET Users Group. While there, John Bristowe interviewed me. That interview is now posted.

Actually, its really three separate interviews. The first starts off as a short history of my career in computers (30 years this August), how I got into .NET Rocks and RunAs Radio, speaking about SQL Server and my Querying Talk. After that we jumped into Strangeloop, what its about and where it came from. Finally, we ended up talking career advice... John asked me my thoughts on how developers can grow in their jobs.

I'd go on, but its probably best just to listen to the interview, its about a half hour long.

We had a great time talking to Charlie Russel, mostly because we dove into a real technical problem around Service Pack 2 for Windows 2003 R2. Love real time diagnostics. But somewhere along the way we remembered to dig into RemoteApp, the new feature in Windows Server 2008 for Terminal Services that allows applications to be accessed remotely as if they were running on the local machine.

As always, send us your thoughts at info@runasradio.com.

The last of our shows recorded at Tech Ed US 2007 in Orlando, Greg and I talked to Jeff Sigman about Network Access Protection. This is a cool new technology designed to limit exposure of your network to computers being plugged into the network - typically laptops.

Check it out, and then let us know what you think at info@runasradio.com.

Shortly after Richard Turner participated in the Identity Panel for .NET Rocks at Tech Ed US 2007 in Orlando, Greg and I grabbed him for a one-on-one interview to focus on how CardSpace affects the IT Pro. Richard changed gears smoothly and we dove right in.

Next week will be the last of the Tech Ed shows. Greg and I are back into the routine of recording new shows, lots more to come! Feel free to fire us an email at info@runasradio.com if there's something specific you'd like to hear!

Greg and I talk to Bill Varga about Quova's technology around figuring out where in the world an IP address is from. We also dig into some of the ideas around why locating your customers from the Internet is important - including regulatory compliance and fraud detection.

This is not one of the Tech Ed shows... there are two more of those coming in the next couple of weeks.

Show #10 is the first of three shows Greg and I recorded at Tech Ed US 2007 in Orlando, Florida. In this show we talked to Isaac Roybal about the new management features of IIS7. We got a chance to look at IIS7 from the point of view of the one-man show, the enterprise IT guy and the ISP... each one has different requirements, and Microsoft has done an admirable job of making sure they all get some help. Isaac also told us about the new IIS.Net community web site. Currently you can get IIS7 either in Vista, or as part of Windows Server 2008 Beta 3.

Another early start. The video folks at Virtual Tech Ed wanted to interview Strangeloop about winning Best in Show for Web Development and Infrastructure. The only way we could fit it into the schedule was to come in at 8am. Josh Bixby and I did the interview with Bryan Von Alexson where we talked about what AppScaler was all about and what it meant to win Best of Tech Ed.

The last day of Tech Ed is kind of sad, really. A lot of people are already gone. The vendor space shut down on Thursday, so its all gone. Its a quieter day, a few anxious folks trying to score whatever swag is left, and trying to locate people they hadn't been able to find earlier in the week.

We'd only gotten three interviews for RunAs Radio, and now Greg Hughes was gone. Carl and I had the three panels for .NET Rocks, but we also wanted four shows as well. We decided on a vignette show for the last slot, a set of interviews that go together to make a complete show. The anchor interview for that show was with the Acropolis team. We got about a half hour interview with them in the lunch area, just before lunch started. Then we ate lunch.

After lunch I had time to prep for my chalk talk on ASP.NET scaling. Chalk talks are interesting things - they're not really sessions, but they're not really Birds of a Feather either. And with the talk being on Friday afternoon, you never know what sort of crowd you're going to get.

I decided against slides, I was just going to draw diagrams on the whiteboard as we went. The conversation tied pretty closely to my blog post on the Scaling as well. I drew an overflow crowd, and I saw Doug Seven peek his head into the back just before I was done. The folks seemed to enjoy the chalk talk, I had a good number of questions at the end, including "so where does Strangeloop fit into this?"

So, 2:30pm on the last day of Tech Ed. The show ends at 5pm. Everything that you could do is pretty much done. I wandered back to the Fish Bowl for one last shirt change... today had been a Strangeloop-to-DNR-to-Tech Ed Speaker day, I switched back to DNR for the end of the show. Jon and Josh were still in Orlando, so we agreed to go to a quiet dinner to talk about how the show had gone for Strangeloop. Carl found Mark Dunn and a few others to go to dinner with.

After dinner I found Carl, he showed me some great video he shot of the space shuttle taking off. He was a good 50 miles away from the launch, recording video in the Rosen Plaza parking lot. No sound, but a clear 45 seconds or so of something going up in a big hurry. Very cool. We adjourned to the hotel bar around 9pm for a few bourbons. Tomorrow we would both fly home.

While we were sitting there contemplating a pretty incredible week, who should show up but a whole group of the Microsoft folks that run Tech Ed! We talked for more than an hour about how Tech Ed went, what we would do differently, what we'd like to do next year. Lots of great ideas, sounds like we'll have even more fun next year!

Started extra early this morning, probably too early. We scheduled the Identity Panel for 9:15am, in sync with the first break of the morning to draw a crowd. It worked, but I think people were a bit too tired from the Under-the-Influencers party the night before. Four days into Tech Ed, you need to think about these things.

And while I'm thinking about Tech Ed, let everyone be warned: Wear comfortable shoes! The Orlando Conference Center is insanely huge. Even if you never set foot outside, if you take a cab everywhere, you are going to be walking for miles. You need good shoes. Tech Ed is a marathon, not a sprint, be careful with your time and energy.

So meantime, there was the Identity Panel. Great line up of panels, including Ani Babaian, Richard Turner, Michele Leroux Bustamante and Scott Golightly. Pat Hynds handled the mike for me out on the floor, and threw in a number of important questions as we explored the topic of Identity pretty thoroughly. Lots of interaction from the audience, even though it was early in the morning.

After the panel I did not race over to the Strangeloop booth, it wasn't going to open 'til 11:30am, and the Speaker Idol Finals started at noon. So I had time to sneak another RunAs Radio interview in, this time with Richard Turner, fresh off the Identity panel. Only this time we focused heavily into the IT side of Identity, including discussions around Active Directory, server management, and so on.

Next up, the Speaker Idol finals. We had five contestants (instead of the planned for four), and decided to have them present in the order they won in: Bob Roudebush, Alain Tadros, Sarbjit Gill, Rob Windsor and Steve Smith. Joel Semeniuk had to leave Tech Ed early, so our judges were: Kate Gregory, Stephen Forte, Michele Leroux Bustamante and Chris Kinsman.

All five contestants presented the same five minute presentation they did during their heats. All five had adopted at least some of the recommendations that the judges had offered. All five were excellent - as far as I am concerned, they should all have speaking slots at Tech Ed next year.

But only one could win, I only had one guaranteed speaking slot to give away. The judges deliberated for a long time, Carl and I talked for quite awhile with each other and the audience. In the end, the winner was Steve Smith.

There was lots of handshakes and congratulations all around. Then I raced over to the Strangeloop booth, which was closing at 3pm. Only Jon and Josh were left to man the booth. Birgit headed home on Wednesday (and missed out on being here for the Best of Tech Ed win), Kent, Lee and Virginia all left Thursday morning. The last hour of the booth was pretty peaceful, but we met with a few interesting folks catching the last moments of the vendor space. At 3pm on the nose, a huge cheer went up, the air walls were deployed to start blocking the vendor space away from the rest of the conference. Jon and Josh started packing up the booth equipment, I headed back to the Fish Bowl to do another RunAs Radio interview.

This time the interview was with Jeff Sigman, talking about Network Access Protection. While there's lots of different aspects to NAP (and you'll have to listen to the show to hear them all), I went crazy for the concept of having different IP addresses assigned to a computer based on an assessment of risk. For me, this meant that finally, when I'm at a Microsoft office, I'll be able to get bandwidth.

We wanted to get four RunAs shows recorded, and we had three in the can, and just enough time to get one more, so we went out searching for someone to interview, but to no avail... so we ended up with three.

Thursday night at Tech Ed is Attendee Party night. This year the attendee party was in Universal City Walk, at the Islands of Adventure. I raced back to the Rosen Plaza to get changed, then over to the Rosen Center to meet up with everyone. Just as I was arriving, a large contingent of RDs (led by Stephen Forte, of course) were heading to the bus. I really wanted a drink, so Carl and I skipped the first bus and sat with Kim Tripp, Paul Randal and Brian Randall.

They made an interesting proposal: Lets go to dinner at Emeril's Tchoup Chop, which is at the Royal Pacific Resort, right beside the Islands of Adventure. I was ready for good meal that wasn't steak, so I was instantly onboard. We took separate cars, and our driver dropped us at the wrong end of City Walk, close to the OTHER Emeril restaurant there. As I walked in I said to the maitre de "This is not Emeril's Tchoup Chop" and he said "You are correct sir, take the ferry over there to the Royal Pacific Resort."

So Carl and I walked down to the ferry to discover it was closed due to lightning. So then we walk past the Islands of Adventure and all the way 'round to the Royal Pacific Resort. Its jungle steamy out, threatening to rain, and lightning dancing everywhere. We can hear announcements from Island Adventure that the rides are closed due to lightning. Suddenly we don't feel all that interested to go the attendee party.

It was a long walk, but it was worth it: Emeril's Tchoup Chop house is an excellent restaurant, we had a multi-course meal that gave us a number of lovely tastes, almost exclusively seafood, although there were other choices, I'd had enough meat for the week. And the conversation... well, the conversation turned to Strangeloop.

I told the tale of how we got started, and the evolution of AppScaler. Brian Randall was especially excited about it, its totally his area of focus, scaling out web applications. And it was right around then that Carl's favorite moment of the entire Tech Ed took place: When I finished explaining exactly how AppScaler's output cache learns what to cache, when to expire it and how to cope with expiry under load efficiently, Brian leaped up, grabbed my head and gave me a big kiss. I guess he liked it.

Back at it bright and early Wednesday morning. Another day, another Speaker Idol heat, Heat 3, at 9:45am. But today is heavily, heavily scheduled. As soon as Heat 3 is over, we're into the ASP.NET Scalability panel. Then about a 90 minute break before the VSTS panel. And right after that, Heat 4 of Speaker Idol. And somewhere in there, I have to visit the Strangeloop booth for awhile.

Speaker Idol Heat 3 kicks off, our contestants are James Kovacs, Mauro Cardarelli, Sarbjit Gill and the wildcard, Rob Windsor. Again, the competition is tough. Michele had a session to speak at, so Scott Golightly stepped in to judge. At the end of the heat, the judges call me over for a ruling. They can't decide - they want a tie. I initially refuse, but then listen through the details.

The tie for them was between Sarbjit Gill and Rob Windsor. Sarbjit had done a demonstration of how to handle internal and external DNS routing properly. Its a topic I know well, but the primarily dev-oriented audience was impressed, they understood it too. And what made Sarbjit's demonstration totally over the top is that he did the whole thing in MS Paint. Drew it all in five minutes, explaining as he went.

Rob Windsor's demo was on WCF, a very clever little application combined with a nice slide deck, using the Tech Ed template, that really clearly explained a very complicated subject... again in five minutes flat.

So the judges couldn't choose - a total seat-of-the-pants IT demo with MS Paint versus a perfectly executed classic slide-and-code demo. I gave in: they were right, it was a tie, both Rob and Sarbjit would go to the finals.

We had some time to re-organize the stage. The judges chairs at the back of the audience space are moved onto the stage to become panelist chairs. The ASP.NET Scalability Panel is comprised of Kent Alstad, Rob Howard, Steve Smith and Stephen Forte. Each one of these guys could easily do a great scalability session, but they don't agree on everything and the debate is lively. We get a few questions from the audience as well.

A two hour minute break between the panels offered a moment to grab some lunch and talk to a few other folks. Lots of people were asking questions about Strangeloop, I never get tired of talking about our product.

At 1:30pm the Visual Studio Team System panel came together. The panelists were Doug Seven, Joel Semeniuk, Mike Azocar and Steve Borg. There were also several Team System advocates in the audience, so it was a very interactive panel discussion, as we navigated through the minefields of Agile vs. Waterfall, CMMI, TFS, and many other acronyms I'm sure I'm forgetting.

We had about an hour between the VSTS panel and the final heat of Speaker Idol. This time our contestants were Corro'll Driskell, Darren Mar-Elia, Jeffrey Palermo and the wildcard, Steve Smith. The judging panel had one substitution, Stephen Forte was doing a session, Barry Gervin sat in for him. Barry fancies himself a Simon Cowell I'm afraid, and tended to be more critical, but the input was effective. The winner for heat 4 was Steve Smith, who did this amazing demo of optimizing ASP.NET while running tests in the Visual Studio Team System Test Edition. He set up the test first, showing a graph of pages per second and database requests per second, then altered the page while the test was running to improve performance. He turned off session and the pages per second went up 10%. Then he turned off viewstate and the pages per second went up 20%. The he configured the page to cache for exactly one second - a mere one second! But the impact on performance was dramatic: The number of pages per second went up 300%, while the database requests for second dropped to 1-2 per second. All in less than five minutes.

The crowd went wild. The judges stared with their mouths hanging open. It was incredibly compelling.

So that set the stage for the finals: Bob Roudebush, Alain Tadros, Sarbjit Gill, Rob Windsor and Steve Smith would compete on Thursday to win a speaking slot at Tech Ed US 2008.

It was about 4pm: Time to race back to the Strangeloop booth before close at 5:30pm. More fans of the show, more influencers, lots of people curious about AppScaler and the company. When the booth closed, back to the Fish Bowl, time to record RunAs Radio. We picked up our first show with Isaac Roybal, talking about IIS7. We primarily focused on the new management features, the folks at Microsoft have really thought about how different IT folks need to manage IIS. The enterprise folks, the small shop folks and the ISPs all have features they'll find incredibly compelling.

When the interview was done, I pounded out more emails, locking down another interview for .NET Rocks, other RunAs interviews and related Tech Ed stuff. Carl was already gone. My goal was to get out the door by 6:30pm. Next door at the Peabody was the Best of Tech Ed award announcements, and the Strangeloop folks were there, hoping for a win.

I didn't make it - there was so much to get done, before I knew it it was 7:15pm, Josh called: Strangeloop had won Best of Tech Ed for Web Development and Infrastructure! I whooped, right there in the Fish Bowl, startling the other folks editing up a storm. There were congratulations all around. I promised to join the Strangeloop folks for dinner. Kent met me at the Fish Bowl and we hopped in a cab to meet up for a celebratory dinner.

Having dinner with everyone meant being late for the Influencers Party. But Virginia & Jill (from Interprose, our PR firm) decided to join me as we headed over that way, catching the tail end of the party with a huge pack of RDs. We managed a couple of drinks and then headed for the Redmond Magazine party down the street at The Groove. A group of RDs traveled with us, must have been a dozen. The Groove was grooving, very loud, lots of dancing, another couple of drinks, and then moved on again, this time for the Peabody. It was almost midnight.

Various people came and went as we went through our hops, ultimately it was about nine that arrived at the Peabody, including me, Virginia, Steve Forte, Kate Gregory, Sasha and a few others. We had another couple of drinks and I talked about Strangeloop and AppScaler at length.

On this week's show Greg and I talked to Eric Marvets, one of the fellows that works with Mark Dunn. Eric took us on a tour of TrueCrypt, a free open-source disk encryption solution. We focused primarily on utilizing TrueCrypt with portable disk storage, like laptops and USB drives. Another security-centric show, Greg was all over it.

We weren't too late last night, so getting up the next morning wasn't all that tough. Got to the Fish Bowl early, the first heat of Speaker Idol was at 9:45am. I spent a lot of the morning in email exchanges with folks for the three panels: Identity, VSTS and ASP.NET Scalability. I realized the stage is best set up for four panelists, each with headsets, plus Carl and I sitting off to the side with our own headsets, and then there's one wireless wand microphone on the floor.

In between panel emails there are emails from nervous Speaker Idol contestants, confirming rules, asking for suggestions, and so on.

Ten minutes before Heat 1 begins, we realize not all the judges can make it. I pulled Chris Kinsman in to cover for Joel who had a session.

Good news is, all the contestants show up. And then a big crowd shows up, over a hundred people. The AV guys are awesome, get everyone geared up and things moves right along. The competitors for the first heat were Mike Azocar, Bill Baldasti and Bob Roudebush. Going last was Kent Alstad, our first wild card. All the presentations are excellent, the judges complain about having to pick a winner, but do their job. The first heat winner is selected: its Bob Roudebush, with his great demonstration of the File Server Resource Manager in Windows Server 2003 R2.

At the end of Heat 1, the wildcard slots quickly disappeared. My four wild cards, in order of the heats, are Kent Alstad, Mark Miller, Rob Windsor and Steve Smith.

When the heat is over, I change shirts and head for the Strangeloop booth which has just opened. Lee is there now, arriving late last night. Things are in full swing, lots of people visiting the booth, seeing the demo, taking data sheets and getting excited about what we're up to. During that time the judges for the Best of Tech Ed competition came by to see AppScaler. We were very excited to be a Finalist, and the judge seemed to "get" what AppScaler was all about.

After helping out for a couple of hours I headed back to the Fish Bowl to gear up for Speaker Idol Heat 2 and continue sorting out who and when for the .NET Rocks panels. Change back to the DNR shirt.

Speaker Idol Heat 2 goes even smoother. The contestants are Brad McGehee, Alain Tadros, Dandy Weyn and the wild card, none other than Mark Miller (who knew he'd never presented at Tech Ed?). Again, the presentations are killer effective. Its amazing how much information these guys can pack into five minutes. The judges rule and Alain Tadros wins with a great code-on-the-fly demo of anonymous delegates.

I spent the rest of the afternoon locking down the panels, sending out invites. We'd have two panels on Wednesday, in between the Speaker Idol heats. First would be the ASP.NET Scalability panel, then the VSTS panel. On Thursday morning we'd do the Identity panel and the Speaker Idol finals. With the details locked down, I fired off the scheduling info to the CommNet folks to get it posted out to the Tech Ed attendees.

In the midst of all this, Greg Hughes arrived. Greg has been my co-host on RunAs Radio from the very beginning of the show, but this was the first time we'd actually met face to face. Our goal for RunAs was to get four interviews recorded with interesting folks at Tech Ed. We debated topics for awhile, but the list tightened up to IIS7, Network Access Protection, Forefront/ISA, Server Virtualization, Cardspace/Identity and anything else Longhorn Server we could find.

As the afternoon wound down, Carl and I rip out the Wednesday morning bluecast message. The mission turns to finding a good dinner. Orlando restaurants are plentiful, but mediocre for the most part. I guess its the nature of the place... its a total tourist town, and there really isn't any penalty for having a lousy restaurant, people keep showing up.

But we were told by numerous folks in the know that Vitos Chop House was the place to go. So we went. Greg, Mark Dunn, Carl & Tina and I all headed over there for a big steak dinner. Lo and behold, sitting a couple of tables away was the entire DevExpress gang, including Mark Miller! The dinner was good (when you're in a town of one star restaurants, being a three star makes you a knock out), and ultimately Mark came and sat with us as well. Lots of laughter and silliness. Our noise attracts attention, Chris Kinsman finds us from the other end of the restaurant.

We split up from dinner. Carl head for The Groove to jam. Mark Miller and I adjourn to the hotel bar to talk for awhile (I drank, Mark doesn't need alcohol). In bed shortly after midnight. Tomorrow is the half way mark!

Well, its that happy time again... off to Orlando!

Carl and I have a ton of things to do at Tech Ed US this year. Most everything we're doing is focused around the Virtual Tech Ed Stage down in the main conference hall across from the sponsor's area.

On Monday evening we'll be doing The 64 Bit Question, where the audience will get to win all kinds of prizes for answering questions about .NET and .NET Rocks!

Then there's Speaker Idol. We've got twelve contestants that are going to give five minute talks before an audience and panel of judges. The winner of Speaker Idol gets a speaking slot at Tech Ed US 2008, including all the perks a speaker gets: airfare, hotel, etc. There are four rounds of three speakers each, two on Tuesday, two on Wednesday. The winner of each round goes on to the finals on Thursday.

And, just to really spice things up, we're offering up a wildcard slot for each round. Think you can handle it? Get a hold of me and I'll get you into the competition. When Carl and I did Speaker Idol in Europe, one of the wildcards made it to the finals!

In between all this craziness we're going to do all sorts of panel discussions on a variety of topics. We've got several worked out already, if you have ideas for more, let me know and perhaps we can put you on the Virtual Tech Ed Stage. Also, we'll be recording .NET Rocks! and RunAs Radio as well. My co-host for RunAs, Greg Hughes, is going to hang with us for a few days.

I'm going to work hard to blog routinely from Tech Ed. Somehow I'll fit it all in.

So if you're at Tech Ed, drop by the Virtual Tech Ed stage and say hi!

Look out! Two security guys on the show! Brian Komar and Greg really dug into the details of the Public Key Infrastructure in this show. I was mostly along for the ride, but really enjoyed discussing the challenges around Extended Validation Certificates. And then there was the whole problem of the green vs. red address bar background in Internet Explorer 7...

Our seventh show, Greg and I dug into the thinking around the latest edition of Microsoft Operations Manager with Rory McCaw. Of course, now its called System Center Operations Manager, but I think I'll always love the MOM acronym.

Let us know what you think of this show and the others, send us an email to info@runasradio.com.

Greg and I dive into a discussion on 64 bit technologies on the desktop and server in the 6th show of RunAs Radio with Wes Miller.

As always, you can send email to info@runasradio.com or comment here for feedback on shows you'd like to see, questions, criticisms, etc.

Seems the last few interviews Greg and I have had just flew by, and our conversation with John Savill on Application Virtualization is no exception.

There's so much to talk about there, if you'd like to hear more, send us an email at info@runasradio.com.

Greg and I had a great time talking to Simon Goldstein about Compliance - HIPAA, SOX and ISO. Simon is a co-worker of Greg's and one of the only people I've ever met who can make a compliance discussion fun and interesting.

I get the sense we're not done with this topic, please let us know!

Greg and I had a blast interviewing Dana Epp on CardSpace. We only had time to explore the client side, but what an explore it was.

I've asked Dana to come back soon and do the server side of CardSpace as well.

Woohoo! Show #2 of RunAs Radio is online!

The discussion that Greg and I had with David Sengupta around Exchange focused primarily on more of the compliance related issues.

Its amazing to me how challenging it is to work through issues around email deleting policies. It sounds harmless, but really is something that you need to get legal advice around and is ultimately a business related decision.

Looks like we finally have info@runasradio.com working properly. Send us email with your thoughts about the show!

Well, you've heard us talking about it on .NET Rocks, and now its finally here... RunAs Radio!

I've always had one foot in the IT camp and one foot in the development camp. That's one of the many things that makes me so weird. I see RunAs as an opportunity to exercise the IT side of my brain.

Greg Hughes is my co-host, he's an associate of Scott Hanselman,  and works for Corillian as the Chief Security Executive and VP of IT. And he's got just the right wacky background for this all to work: started as a journalist, became a cop, then moved to the security side of IT. As he says, he's still hunting bad guys, just for more money (and less risk of being shot).

RunAs is a PWOP Production, just like .NET Rocks, dnrTV, Hanselminutes, etc. Dax built the web site, its Carl's software that drives the thing, I just find guests, book them, interview them and send the files to PWOP for processing.

I did get a fancy new recording rig to make all this work. My broadcast mike plugs into a MOTU Traveller that uses Firewire into Terrance, my 4960x1600 x64 XP beast. Also plugged into the MOTU is a Telos ONE+ONE for capture two telephone lines: one for Greg, and one for the guest. So I record my channel, Greg's phone track and the guest. Greg also does a local recording of himself (maximum quality, of course) and then all that is combined to make a show.

We're going to keep the show shorter than .NET Rocks, at least for now. I want to make sure the show stays focused on one topic for the duration. Of course, this will change based on what the listener wants... so tell me what you want! I'm all ears for show ideas, format changes, you name it. The email address for RunAs is info@runasradio.com.

It's also Greg's 40th birthday today. So Happy Birthday Greg!